"Quickly outlander, I haven't much time."
Morrowind, quintessential stranger in a strange land experience, captured a sense of Otherness better than anything else I have come across. The island of Vvardenfell is an odd and desolate place, riven through with mistrust, pervasively lonely and populated by a people that are wholly foreign; their language, politics and culture a far cry from our own. That alien nature lends itself perfectly to exploration - it's not just the bizarre land that you are exploring (menacing mist and towering mushrooms, ash storms and the corpses of giant hollowed-out crabs) but the very people themselves, growing to understand them and their background, their beliefs. You learn of mythical figures in their history, the people that made their world the way it is, and eventually you may even meet them too; having heard so much about them these meetings becomes all the more powerful an experience. Vivec, warrior-poet deity of the Tribunal Temple, is particularly interesting - a being that is on some level aware that they are a fiction, they don't actually exist, and yet in recognising that their universe is a fiction they are able to alter it, rewriting history such that they were always a god. Much like the rest of the setting, it is completely bizarre and fascinating to uncover.
Morrowind was such a defining feature of my childhood that I'm not sure I can separate my own nostalgia from the genuine qualities of the game; I would say it had a greater impact on my interests than anything else I ate up as a kid. Revisiting it feels almost like coming home and I still get goosebumps whenever I hear the title theme:
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